A spectacular skate, and a wonderful misuse of forms.

• A few years ago, when James from Atomic Frontier did a guest video for my channel, I said he's going to have my job in a few years. Good news: he basically has now! He climbed AT&T Long Lines towers to explain why the internet isn't quite as fast as it used to be, and it's a great video.
   
• Rockets are not meant to launch sideways. (Scott Manley explains why it happened.)
   
• A mesmerising and surely-dangerous video of speed skating along traffic-filled New York City roads, made much calmer by the jazz playing underneath it. It's astonishing what can be done with relatively-cheap, off-the-shelf camera gear now: the latest generation of action cameras produce footage that can be properly colour-graded, while keeping the camera so stable it looks like a video game. (Thanks to Matt for sending this over.)
   

• How would you make an online version of an escape room puzzle? If you're like me, you'd first think about building a web site, writing code, managing user logins and security... or you could just use Google Forms. I'm linking that not as a specific tutorial for newsletter readers, but just as a mind-expanding thing: it never occurred to me that a forms tool could be used this way, by non-technical folks, to make games for education or entertainment or both. I love it when tools are repurposed this way, particularly business tools. (If you search for 'google forms escape room' you'll find plenty to try!)
   
• I'm glad the Covid-19 Signage Archive exists: ephemera like this often gives an insight for historians. I'm not sure I want to spend much time there, though.
   
• Incredible 2024 headline: a nightly Waymo robotaxi parking lot honkfest is waking San Francisco neighbors. Which has promptly been livestreamed with lo-fi beats.
   

And finally: there is no way I could ever have predicted the second half of this TikTok.

All the best,

— Tom